In this article, we will list the 10 best stocks in the Leopold Aschenbrenner stock portfolio. Please visit From Fired Researcher to $13.7 Billion King: How Leopold Aschenbrenner Broke the Hedge Fund World if you would like to see the extended list and the methodology behind it.
10. Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company Limited (NYSE:TSM) PUT
Situational Awareness LP’s Stake: $535 Million
Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company Limited (NYSE:TSM) is a new addition to the 13F portfolio of Situational Awareness LP. The fund declared a new stake in the company in filings for the first quarter of 2026. This stake consists of PUT bets worth close to 1.5 million shares. Previously, Leopold Aschenbrenner had bought a stake in this chip giant in the third quarter of 2025. This position consisted of PUT bets worth 270,000 shares and was sold off completely by the next quarter. TSM manufactures, packages, tests, and sells integrated circuits and other semiconductor devices. It is a major chip manufacturing partner for NVIDIA, the biggest AI company in the world. Leopold Aschenbrenner has a bearish outlook on both companies, per the latest securities filings.
READ MORE: Billionaire Tom Steyer’s 10 Stock Picks with Huge Upside Potential.
Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company Limited (NYSE:TSM) has been forced to satisfy Western political demands and diversify the supply chain. As part of this, it is building expensive foundries outside of Taiwan, most notably in Arizona, Japan, and Germany. In the Q1 2026 update, TSM management announced they are pushing their full-year 2026 capital expenditures to the absolute high end of their $52 billion to $56 billion range. Building advanced fabrication plants in the United States and Europe is mathematically less efficient. Internal construction and operational costs in Arizona are estimated to be 4x to 5x higher than building identical fabs in Hsinchu or Tainan. TSM management explicitly admitted that overseas fab expansions and the initial ramp-up of next-generation nodes will trigger an immediate 2% to 3% gross margin dilution starting in the latter half of 2026 and extending into 2027.
9. CoreWeave, Inc. (NASDAQ:CRWV)
Situational Awareness LP’s Stake: $556 Million
CoreWeave, Inc. (NASDAQ:CRWV) has featured in the 13F portfolio of Situational Awareness LP since the first quarter of 2025. Back then, this position comprised 1.2 million shares and was sold off by the next quarter. A new position was then opened in the third quarter of 2025. This comprised 4.1 million shares. In the fourth quarter of 2025, the fund added to it by 48%, growing the stake to over 6 million shares. Filings for the first quarter of 2026 show that the fund owned over 7.1 million shares in the firm, up close to 18% compared to the previous quarter. The firm operates as a cloud infrastructure technology company in the United States. The company is part of a group of crypto firms that have transitioned into AI infrastructure in recent years. Leopold Aschenbrenner is bullish on this trend.
CoreWeave, Inc. (NASDAQ:CRWV) is the fastest cloud infrastructure provider in history to cross major revenue milestones. For the twelve months ending March 2026, the Trailing Twelve Month revenue was $6.23 billion, a 217.6% increase year-over-year. Looking strictly at Q1 2026, quarterly revenue came in at $2.08 billion, a 111.6% increase compared to the $0.98 billion posted in Q1 2025. Management officially guided full-year FY2026 revenue to between $12 billion and $13 billion, indicating that the sequential growth curve is actively steepening as more clusters come online. In May 2026 earnings, CoreWeave announced that the revenue backlog had reached nearly $100 billion. This represents a jump from the $66.8 billion backlog reported at the end of fiscal 2025 and a nearly 400% increase over early 2025.
8. Micron Technology, Inc. (NASDAQ:MU) PUT
Situational Awareness LP’s Stake: $584 Million
Micron Technology, Inc. (NASDAQ:MU) is a new addition to the 13F portfolio of Situational Awareness LP. The fund declared a new stake in the company in filings for the first quarter of 2026. This stake consists of PUT bets worth close to 1.7 million shares. Previously, Leopold Aschenbrenner had bought a stake in this chip giant in the third quarter of 2025. This position consisted of PUT bets worth 300,000 shares and was sold off completely by the next quarter. Micron designs, develops, manufactures, and sells memory and storage products. Latest reports from Goldman Sachs suggest that NVIDIA and Micron together will account for a third of S&P 500 EPS growth this year alone.
READ MORE: Mark Cuban Stock Portfolio: 8 Best Stocks to Buy.
Even as Micron Technology (NASDAQ:MU) rides the AI wave, it is facing competitive headwinds. With calendar 2026 HBM capacity fully locked in, supply chain allocations for upcoming advanced architectures show a distinct shift. NVIDIA reportedly selected SK Hynix and Samsung over Micron for the primary, high-volume supply allocations of top-tier ultra-advanced platforms. Memory is historically a commodity. If Micron loses out on the highest-margin, tier-1 architectural slots to SK Hynix and Samsung, it will be forced to compete on price for secondary allocations. Hedge funds argue that Micron is being priced at a premium multiple, yet it remains highly vulnerable to being out-scaled by foreign competitors who operate with lower structural capital costs.
7. Sandisk Corporation (NASDAQ:SNDK)
Situational Awareness LP’s Stake: $724 Million
Sandisk Corporation (NASDAQ:SNDK) has featured in the 13F portfolio of Situational Awareness LP since the third quarter of 2025. Back then, this position consisted of around 115,000 shares. In the fourth quarter of 2025, Leopold Aschenbrenner added to this holding by over 800%, growing it to over a million shares. Filings for the first quarter of 2026 reveal that the fund owns 1.14 million shares in the company, up 8% compared to the previous quarter. The firm develops, manufactures, and sells data storage devices and solutions using NAND flash technology in the United States, Europe, the Middle East, Africa, Asia, and internationally. The share price of Sandisk has jumped over 600% in the past six months.
Sandisk Corporation (NASDAQ:SNDK) has emerged as one of the most important AI plays, with investment advisory Barclays terming memory the most attractive vertical below accelerators. Training advanced LLMs and running Agentic AI applications creates massive data lakes that require high-speed, non-volatile memory and Solid State Drives (SSDs) rather than traditional spinning hard drives. In fiscal Q3 2026 earnings, SanDisk reported that Enterprise SSD revenue surged 114% year-over-year. This enterprise push drove total corporate gross revenue well past consensus Wall Street estimates. Shifting the sales mix away from low-margin consumer micro-SD cards and USB drives toward premium AI-optimized Enterprise Data Center SSDs expanded corporate Gross Margin to 44.5%, up 1,200 basis points from the historical baseline.
6. Bloom Energy Corporation (NYSE:BE)
Situational Awareness LP’s Stake: $879 Million
Bloom Energy Corporation (NYSE:BE) is the largest bull position in the 13F portfolio of Situational Awareness LP. In filings for the first quarter of 2026, the fund revealed it owned close to 6.5 million shares in the company, down close to 35% compared to filings for the fourth quarter of 2025. This bet is an excellent case study into the investing acumen of Leopold Aschenbrenner. Over the past six months, the share price of the firm has jumped close to 170% and Aschenbrenner has capitalized handsomely on this gain. The core thesis remains the same. Data center operators can buy all the GPUs they want, but standard utility grids cannot supply electricity fast enough to power them. The solid-oxide fuel cells of Bloom bypass the grid entirely by providing immediate, off-grid, on-site baseload power using natural gas or hydrogen.
In the Q1 2026 earnings report, Bloom Energy Corporation (NYSE:BE) reported record-breaking revenue of $751.1 million, up 130.4% year-over-year from $326 million in Q1 2025. This obliterated Wall Street consensus estimates, which expected a modest $531 million to $552 million. The top-line acceleration was driven by the Product segment, which surged 208.4% to $653.3 million, accounting for 87% of total corporate revenue. The crown jewel of this validation is the selection of Bloom as the exclusive power provider for the Project Jupiter AI data center cluster. Bloom is contracted to provide up to 2.45 gigawatts of continuous, on-site power to the site. To put this into context, 2.45 GW is enough electricity to power roughly 1.8 million homes, or roughly 2.5 times the total power capacity of all data centers built in Northern Virginia.
5. Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. (NASDAQ:AMD) PUT
Situational Awareness LP’s Stake: $969 Million
Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. (NASDAQ:AMD) is a new addition to the 13F portfolio of Situational Awareness LP. The fund declared a new stake in the company in filings for the first quarter of 2026. This stake consists of PUT bets worth close to 5 million shares. In the hedge fund world, Leopold Aschenbrenner is not alone in betting against AMD. Other elite money managers like Ken Griffin, Israel Englander, Sander Gerber, and Dmitry Balyasny have also declared bearish bets against the chip company. Of the $10.3 billion in Q1 2026 revenue for AMD, the data center segment accounted for $5.8 billion. However, NVIDIA continues to capture an estimated 90% to 95% market share of high-end AI data center GPUs.
READ ALSO: 12 Best Stocks to Buy According to Billionaire David Abrams.
Elite money managers have argued that Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. (NASDAQ:AMD) is fighting an uphill battle against an entrenched ecosystem. The true moat for NVIDIA is not just the hardware, but the proprietary CUDA software ecosystem, which has millions of software developers locked in. Enterprise clients are proving hesitant to rewrite their entire software stacks to migrate to the open-source ROCm platform offered by AMD. Short-sellers calculate that AMD is being valued as an equal AI peer to NVIDIA, when it is actually collecting the residual overflow demand from hyperscalers who cannot secure enough NVIDIA allocation.
4. Broadcom Inc. (NASDAQ:AVGO) PUT
Situational Awareness LP’s Stake: $1 Billion
Broadcom Inc. (NASDAQ:AVGO) is a new addition to the 13F portfolio of Situational Awareness LP. The fund declared a new stake in the company in filings for the first quarter of 2026. This stake consists of PUT bets worth close to 3 million shares. Previously, Leopold Aschenbrenner had bought a stake in this chip giant in the third quarter of 2025. This position consisted of PUT bets worth 230,000 shares and was sold off completely by the next quarter. In addition to Leopold Aschenbrenner, other elite money managers with bearish bets on Broadcom include Ken Griffin, Israel Englander, Sander Gerber, Matthew Hulsizer, and D.E. Shaw. The bet against Broadcom aligns with a broader bet against semis that is a central theme of the latest 13F filings by Leopold Aschenbrenner.
Broadcom Inc. (NASDAQ:AVGO) does not sell general-purpose GPUs like NVIDIA. The AI growth of the firm is driven by designing custom AI accelerators and high-speed Ethernet networking for cloud giants. This business relies heavily on a concentrated base of six major hyperscaler customers, including Alphabet, Meta, and OpenAI, for AI revenues. Even though the AI-specific backlog sits at $73 billion, pushing AI-related revenue up to 44% of the total sales mix, short-sellers have pointed out that cloud customers are using Broadcom as a stepping stone while they build out internal engineering teams to design their own proprietary custom silicon.
3. Oracle Corporation (NYSE:ORCL) PUT
Situational Awareness LP’s Stake: $1.1 Billion
Oracle Corporation (NYSE:ORCL) is a new addition to the 13F portfolio of Situational Awareness LP. The fund declared a new stake in the company in filings for the first quarter of 2026. This stake consists of PUT bets worth close to 7 million shares. The firm offers products and services that address enterprise information technology environments worldwide. Cloud services account for the largest share in the revenue mix for the company. In recent months, Oracle has started building data centers within AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud. It is also partnering with OpenAI on a $300 billion Stargate AI project. The contract backlog of the company has reached close to half a trillion dollars.
READ ALSO: Lone Pine’s Non-AI Strategy Falters: 10 Non-AI Stocks Weighing Down Stephen Mandel’s 2026 Returns.
Apart from Leopold Aschenbrenner, other prominent fund managers with bearish bets on Oracle Corporation (NYSE:ORCL) include Ken Griffin, Israel Englander, D.E. Shaw, Chris Rokos, and Sander Gerber, among others. The bear case for the stock revolves around converting the massive contract backlog into recognized revenue. This would require building physical data centers, like the proposed Stargate AI cluster, that do not yet exist. Bearish money managers are betting that the market has prematurely priced in this $553 billion backlog as immediate earnings, completely ignoring the intense execution risk, supply-chain delays for cooling turbines, and power-grid connectivity bottlenecks that could push actual revenue recognition.
2. NVIDIA Corporation (NASDAQ:NVDA) PUT
Situational Awareness LP’s Stake: $1.6 Billion
NVIDIA Corporation (NASDAQ:NVDA) is a new addition to the 13F portfolio of Situational Awareness LP. The fund declared a new stake in the company in filings for the first quarter of 2026. This stake consists of PUT bets worth close to 9 million shares. Previously, Leopold Aschenbrenner had bought a stake in this chip giant in the third quarter of 2025. This position consisted of PUT bets worth 1.6 million shares and was sold off completely by the next quarter. Back then, this bearish bet represented over 7% of the 13F portfolio of the fund. The latest one is the second-largest position and represents over 11% of the portfolio. Leopold Aschenbrenner is not the only hedge fund manager betting against the chip giant.
Prominent names like Michael Burry, Ken Griffin, Israel Englander, and Sander Gerber also hold PUT options on NVIDIA Corporation (NASDAQ:NVDA), per latest filings. There is concern among some in the hedge fund universe that as AI shifts from training models to running autonomous agents, the required hardware changes. Complex sequential logic execution favors high-performance CPUs. While NVIDIA commands an estimated 90% to 95% market share in AI training GPUs, it has virtually no market share in the traditional x86 enterprise data center CPU market, which is dominated by AMD and Intel. Bearish investors are betting that NVIDIA GPU demand will face a structural ceiling as compute requirements diversify.
1. VanEck Semiconductor ETF (NASDAQ:SMH) PUT
Situational Awareness LP’s Stake: $2 Billion
VanEck Semiconductor ETF (NASDAQ:SMH) is a new addition to the 13F portfolio of Situational Awareness LP. The fund declared a new stake in the company in filings for the first quarter of 2026. This stake consists of PUT bets worth over 5.3 million shares. Previously, Leopold Aschenbrenner had bought a stake in this ETF back in the second quarter of 2025. This position consisted of more than 2 million shares and was sold off by the next quarter. The bearish bet against the chip sector represents close to 15% of the 13F portfolio of the hedge fund run by AI expert Leopold Aschenbrenner. This is not an isolated bet but part of a larger close to $8 billion position against the chip sector that comprises over 60% of 13F portfolio of the fund.
This massive bet against VanEck Semiconductor ETF (NASDAQ:SMH) represents a continuation of an investment strategy championed by Leopold Aschenbrenner that focuses on companies providing the picks and shovels for this AI revolution. In layman terms, instead of betting on the gold itself, like AI software or chip firms, Aschenbrenner is betting on the companies that provide the picks and shovels for gold digging, like power companies and repositioned Bitcoin miners providing AI compute. In his June 2024 essay titled SITUATIONAL AWARENESS: The Decade Ahead, Aschenbrenner had predicted that, “As AI revenue grows rapidly, many trillions of dollars will go into GPU, datacenter, and power buildout before the end of the decade. The industrial mobilization, including growing US electricity production by 10s of percent, will be intense”.
While we acknowledge the potential of SMH to grow, our conviction lies in the belief that some AI stocks hold greater promise for delivering higher returns and have limited downside risk. If you are looking for an AI stock that is more promising than SMH and that has 100x upside potential, check out our report about the cheapest AI stock.
READ NEXT: Growth Stock Portfolio: 12 Stock Picks by Carl C. Icahn and Chris Rokos Stock Portfolio: Top 10 Stock Picks.
Disclosure: None. Insider Monkey focuses on uncovering the best investment ideas of hedge funds and insiders. Please subscribe to our free daily e-newsletter to get the latest investment ideas from hedge funds’ investor letters by entering your email address below.
